With the Olympics over, we can switch our focus from the halfpipe to the highbrow. Check the chart to see which magazines get a gold.

Harper’s leads with a heavy cover story on suicides by prisoners at the Guantanamo Naval Base and the spotty investigations by the US Naval Criminal Investigative Services, or NCIS. It’s a tough story to write, for sure, but even tougher to read, with a lot of details and little connecting of the dots. We much preferred the story on painless weapons of war, or the “soft-kill” or “less lethal” weapons intended for protestors or unarmed civilians. Our government is a couple of decades too late as today’s mass protests occur on the Internet rather than in the streets.

Reader’s Digest is the comfort food of the magazine world — safe, reassuring, reliably good. Its copy is even presented in bite-size morsels. The March issue, for instance, features pieces like 50 emergency room secrets and 13 questions with NCIS star Mark Harmon. The problem with comfort food and Reader’s Digest is that while it is frequently good it is rarely ever great. “Crisis on the Ice,” a story about the struggle to save a father and his two sons after they fell through ice into a Wyoming reservoir, is so distilled that all the suspense is stripped away. And we’re not exactly sure what the untold story is in “Willie Mays: The Untold Story of a Baseball Legend.”

The Atlantic, by contrast, is not at all like comfort food. It is challenging and dense, like a Mario Batali dish, and oftentimes as intellectually tasty. The recipe for this month’s issue has all of those ingredients. For example, the cover story, “How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America,” paints a bleak but entirely plausible picture of how the recession will result in a generation of depressed, divorced, financially ravaged workers. Another piece posits that health insurance not only heals but also kills. That may seem contradictory until you read some of the statistics cited, such as the fact that as many as 80,000 people die each year as a result of infections stemming from medical treatment.

New York magazine’s profile of Rupert Murdoch is a good read on the News Corp. chief (News Corp. owns The Post), but it’s also filled with a lot of stuff we already know — including the battle to challenge the New York Times and public efforts to stop Google from poaching content. More important, the question posed by the author at the start of the article, “What does he want now?” is never really answered. Still, it’s fun to read about the author’s chat with Murdoch’s 101-year- old mother, in which she compares grandsons James and Lachlan but also says she has no idea about succession plans. “I don’t discuss it with [Rupert]. I’m sure he’ll never retire,” she says. We also like the mag’s quick and smarting analysis of Gov. David Paterson backing down from another term. The mag rightly says this means Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is governor-in-waiting, which means all eyes are suddenly off Paterson and on him.

A picture of Richard M. Daley, with a heaping sandwich in front of him, anchors The New Yorker‘s package on Chicago’s mayor. As the article points out, “A Daley has ruled Chicago for 42 of the past 35 years.” Speaking of pictures, the shot of performance artist Marina Abramovic with snakes curled around her neck and head gets your attention. Her profile is certainly more concrete than Anthony Lane’s take on 3-D, which somehow spotlights Oliver Wendell Holmes. Patricia Marx opens a piece on Brooklyn with a laugh-out-loud anecdote about a well-intentioned Good Samaritan who finds a hat, only to cause a furor when he tries to find the owner.

Newsweek offers up a good dose of thought-provoking articles, including its cover story on how Iraq — now that no one’s looking — is finally turning into the democracy former President Bush promised. The story mentions, for instance, the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra, where Kurds, Christians, Sunnis and Shiites all perform together. We also like the Julia Baird piece questioning the effectiveness of all these “tell-all” memoirs from jilted spouses like Elizabeth Edwards and Jenny Sanford.

We’re less impressed by Time‘s cover story, “Taking on the Taliban,” which, while well reported, offers little clarity on Afghanistan. We much preferred the status report Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, outlining his recent cooperation with the Obama White House, including efforts to repeal the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” ban. We also liked the profile on Jenny McCarthy’s latest role as controversial autism advocate. It’s controversial because she says vaccines gave her son autism despite the fact that evidence suggests otherwise. But c’mon. It’s hardly true that McCarthy is “now more famous as an advocate . . . than she ever was as an actress.”